It Was A Dark And Stormy Night ....

Foul! Why "abecedarian" in that "abecedarian journeyman". A muckety muck modifier! Why not something more lighter?

If words were atoms, then letters would be electrons restless to fly away or jump into lowest orbitals. Pauli would agree that such words are unstable and prefer smaller words.

Recognising good writing is a child's play. Cultivating it is like claiming the Grand Slam where one ought to blaze in style, diction, coherence and concision.

This happened several years ago but is still fresh in my memory. Born in India, schooled by a Christian doyen who made me warble Biblical hymns to the distraught of my mom whose daughter mangled the chaste sukhlam baradaram in her native piety, I was proud of upholding the vestiges of my Colonial English. That hubris lasted up until college, and beyond, till I plunked slap-bang in the imperial island surrounded by these seas of Victorian language (you lightly referred) only to realize the ugliness of my language.

What was wrong? There was nothing wrong. But the diction and fluency of my colleagues was far superior. As Gene Shalit ruefully pointed, the first innings of one's life is spent on hungered learning and the second innings on deflated unlearning. There was a long period of unlearning which still continues. What is wrong? Again nothing is wrong. The tides of language have changed. What hit me hard was the wit, coherence and excision of formalism in writing. The corporate mail was so elegant (not formal), so witty (not solemn), and so rich (not dense). This isn't the looming corporatese I feared. It was charming and amusing. Then, I made a conscious attempt to mend my style of writing, snipping Indianisms, shedding hooptedoodle, and align with the team's informal tone. Thus, the displacement from India stirred the beginnings of your "abecedarian" in me. I had to re-learn the canon of English writing but this time a more functional and not a frothy English.

Hello, you!

I like your provision for such a double-dog dare, to boldly go where no man has travelled before whilst breaching the frontiers of intrepid writing styles.

 

Reminds me of René Magritte's playful titles for his paintings. Rumour has it that Magritte used to show his paintings to his friends and solicit playful "titles" to match with his surreal artwork. My favourite titles are Hegel's Holiday and Clairvoyance. In Hitchen's quirky style to recast titles of famous books, can Magritte's paintings be rechristened with witty titles?

To me, this is again good writing — squash a diffuse theme into a succinct phrase. Hmm, talking of the Great Horsemen, I prefer Hitchen's style to Dawkins'. Dawkins occasionally whips up whimsical constructs but Hitchen's the game-changer with his quirky wit in his compilation of rip-roaring humanistic articles.

 

Your George Orwell's iconic essay brings to my mind another well-disposed language stylist who shaped a generation to yelp "Gotcha!" whilst playing Grammar Bingo. Yes, I am talking about that William Safire (WS) and his column "On Language" in NYT. I haven't followed since Ben Zimmer took over but WS was a crackerjack!

Here's the archive of the column: link

Let's select one article from November 27, 1994

"Et tu, Safire?" writes Klaus Perls of New York, adding, "Then, English, die!" What moved my corrector to this Caesarean mock-horror was this rhetorical question I posed in telling the Secretary of State how to deal with North Korea: "Which works best, the promise of reward or the fear of punishment?"

Instantly spotting the misuse of the superlative in place of the comparative, Mr. Perls notes, "I thought that in a comparison of two, the word is better better." He is correct, of course, though his parody of the conclusion to Shakespearean Caesar's remark to the stabbing Brutus ("Then fall, Caesar!") calls for the parallel "Then die, English!"

"Calls for the parallel" steals the thunder. To me good writing is packing humour, wit, barb, and sense not in bon mots but tiny bon-bons that explode when tugged.

 

I am on my next fashionable nonsense funding.
More tomorrow on the gobbledegook in technical writing.

 

I've not checked all the links but I am confident that in three yuge pages, you must have grazed the Elmore Leonards and William Zinssers and their guides and cheatsheets, and squibs and broadsheets on “good writing”.

What's with the Bulwer and Bowlby and this Victorian fascination? I assumed we are doing some Flaubert stylesheets and his le mot juste cravings with your Parisian predisposition.

Flaubert famously avoided the inexact, the abstract, the vaguely inapt expression, and scrupulously eschewed the cliché. In a letter to George Sand he said that he spends his time "trying to write harmonious sentences, avoiding assonances."

Flaubert believed in, and pursued, the principle of finding "le mot juste" ("the right word"), which he considered as the key means to achieve quality in literary art.He worked in sullen solitude—sometimes occupying a week in the completion of one page—never satisfied with what he had composed. In Flaubert's correspondence he intimates this, explaining correct prose did not flow out of him and that his style was achieved through work and revision.

This painstaking style of writing is also evident when one compares Flaubert’s output over a lifetime to that of his peers (for example Balzac or Zola). Flaubert published much less prolifically than was the norm for his time and never got near the pace of a novel a year, as his peers often achieved during their peaks of activity. Walter Pater famously called Flaubert the "martyr of style.